Improving Ones Taste

Mauro

I recently read Cal Newport latest book: "Slow Productivity". In the third part of the book he talks about obsessing over quality, mentioning the famous speech by Ira Glass: "The Gap". Cal Newport makes a point that in order to achieve brilliance, hard work is necessary but not sufficient and that we should spend time honing our taste.

I wonder if anybody relates to this concept, and if any of you has resources to suggest to improve ones taste in creating and writing notes.

ctietze

I'm not familiar with Ira Glass or Cal Newport's latest book. Can you provide a bit more detail from your personal summary/interpretation?

Mauro

@ctietze said:
I'm not familiar with Ira Glass or Cal Newport's latest book. Can you provide a bit more detail from your personal summary/interpretation?

Sure. In Cal Newport's latest book he comes up with the concept of Slow Productivity. The idea is that visible activity is erroneously used as a mean to approximate actual productive effort. Cal suggests that in order to pursue high quality work we should:
1. Do fewer things
2. Work at a natural pace
3. Obsess over quality

In his last point, "Obsess over quality," he states that:

No amount of hard work will lead to brilliance if you don't yet have a good understanding of what brilliance could mean.

To prove his point Cal uses as an example the fact that, of the five finalists for the most recent PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, four of them attended or taught in MFA programs before publishing their award-caliber books. He attributes their success to the fact that during MFA programs writers spend two years reading and critiquing and admiring work by other young writers, so their standards for what writing can achieve sharpen.

I somewhat agree with Cal Newport's point and I agree with @Sascha that the single note matters. I have always considered having a Zettlekasten a very personal process and it's hard to understand how good ones notes actually are, so I was wondering if there are any resources to improve our standard when it comes down to create zettles or write better notes.

ZettelDistraction

A cautionary tale from "Art and Fear" (lightly edited):

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he divided the class into two groups. He said all those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced and all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A," forty pounds a "B," and so on. However, those graded on "quality" needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an "A."

Well, came grading time, and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection and, in the end, had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

If we knew what was worth doing, what was essential instead of merely interesting, we might produce something of value. I have an acquaintance who recently gave a meandering talk that blew well beyond the one-hour time limit with a discursive background introduction that failed to situate his contribution before finally getting to it. This individual will never listen to my advice, stick to the point, know the audience and expected level, state the problem he is addressing, and clarify for the audience how his work goes further than the prior art--it was a mistake to ask whether he needed the hour-long preamble. We can improve our taste to some extent, but cases like this suggest that nature plays a considerable role in its development.

Find examples worth emulating that stand the test of time and study them. It's hard to offer more than generalities, much less a foolproof guide to impeccable taste. Best of luck!

Sascha

@Mauro said:
I have always considered having a Zettlekasten a very personal process and it's hard to understand how good ones notes actually are, so I was wondering if there are any resources to improve our standard when it comes down to create zettles or write better notes.

Ignore that fact that you are using a specific system to manage all of your notes. Then you are free to examine the individual note with the tools to assess the quality of the idea.

Then it just comes down to your expertise on the piece of knowledge. There is plenty of material out there for example to judge the quality of an argument. There is the formal aspect of it (Logic), the stylistic aspect of it (Rhetoric) and there is the contextual aspect of it (e.g. impact in the field).

Will

Ira Glass was the host of This American Life, a radio program that ran on National Public Radio for a long time. He was critical and expressive about his craft of interviewing and story production. I've followed him for years. He is a mentor. His advice fit what I was looking for, and I applied it to my own creative endeavors.

Here is the heart of Ira Glass's expression that Cal Newport refers to.
THE GAP by Ira Glass on Vimeo

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I wish somebody had said this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It's not that great. It's trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it's not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It takes awhile. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

—Ira Glass

Mauro

@ZettelDistraction said:
A cautionary tale from "Art and Fear" (lightly edited):

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he divided the class into two groups. He said all those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced and all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A," forty pounds a "B," and so on. However, those graded on "quality" needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an "A."

Well, came grading time, and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection and, in the end, had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

If we knew what was worth doing, what was essential instead of merely interesting, we might produce something of value. I have an acquaintance who recently gave a meandering talk that blew well beyond the one-hour time limit with a discursive background introduction that failed to situate his contribution before finally getting to it. This individual will never listen to my advice, stick to the point, know the audience and expected level, state the problem he is addressing, and clarify for the audience how his work goes further than the prior art--it was a mistake to ask whether he needed the hour-long preamble. We can improve our taste to some extent, but cases like this suggest that nature plays a considerable role in its development.

Find examples worth emulating that stand the test of time and study them. It's hard to offer more than generalities, much less a foolproof guide to impeccable taste. Best of luck!

Regarding the quote you wrote. I agree, hard work and repetition, especially in the beginning, are probably the only thing you should worry about, it's clear how the person who wrote a thousand notes will produce better notes than the person who just started out. As a counterargument I would point out how in some fields it's common to notice little to no improvement even after extensive practice. Chess could be used as an example, players remain stagnated at their level even after thousand of hours of practice, I attribute this problem to a lack of clear feedback. I want the quality of my notes to improve and to produce great notes, however I'm not sure what a great note looks like.

GeoEng51

I like this discussion and am thankful for several of Cal Newport's books that prompted it.

As a related side issue, I point out that there is a difference between getting a year's experience ten times over and getting ten years' experience. One needs to progress, not just repeat.

A relevant area for us in writing zettels is developing quality content. This has at least two parts: improving our critical thinking and improving our writing skills. The former has been extensively discussed in this forum, most recently at:

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2870/how-to-improve-thinking-skills/p1

Regarding the latter, I used to think I was an excellent writer of technical articles, mainly because I had spent many years doing just that. However, I learned that my writing could be more concise and clear by using tools such as Grammarly, the Hemingway editor, and ProWritingAid. For other alternatives, see:

https://kinsta.com/blog/grammarly-alternative/

It would be easy to dismiss these tools, thinking they are inferior because they run on grammar rules and artificial intelligence. This would be a mistake. One must use them intelligently, of course, but one can benefit from the depth of experience reflected in the vast amount of quality writing used to train the AIs involved. A little humility on our part is called for when dealing with AI.

Others have pointed out that as we improve our skills through feedback and practice, our "taste" is also enhanced. I hope this isn't a "chicken and the egg" question, though - sometimes taste can precede our skills, and sometimes it can evolve as we develop them.